Anti-Semitic Pope Pius XII leaves a meeting with Adolph Hitler There have been 265 Roman Catholic popes, 266 if you count Pope Joan, who existed only in the popular imagination in the Middle Ages, and these don’t count various usurpers, interlopers and antipopes. To paraphrase Longfellow, some of the real popes were good, some were bad and some were horrid. Regular readers of this blog are aware that...

The fallouts of the alleged Iranian attempt to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington will heighten Middle East tensions, even as pressure grows on Israelis and Palestinians to sit again at the peace table. If the allegations turn out to be true, the Saudi’s will put intense pressure on the Obama administration for exemplary and swift action. The risk is that the White House might, against its better judgment,...

The latest dust-up on the already tedious 2012 presidential campaign trail was triggered several days ago when a pastor and Rick Perry supporter told interviewers that Christians should refrain from voting for Mormon candidates like Mitt Romney (and presumably, Jon Huntsman too) for president because, he asserted, Mormonism is a cult. As a Christian pastor myself (Lutheran), I decided to address the two questions...

Republican Presidential Candidates Response to Attack on Mitt Romney's Religion You’ve heard about the JFK book “Profiles in Courage?” This could be the inspiration for a book “Profiles in Political Jellyfish”: several Republican Presidential candidates are carefully parsing their words on the attack on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s religion and whether that...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is now opening dealing with an issue that yours truly and some other analysts have long contended has slowly simmered in the Republican Party, limiting his poll numbers and a kind of ticking time bomb issue: bigotry among some aimed at his religion. Now, a day after it boiled over in the surface, he’s starting to deal with the issue of bgotry head on: A day after a...

Way too many times have I cringed when the religious right uses the Bible to justify evil and prejudice in our lives. Way too many times have I been infuriated when the political right has used the Constitution to support and justify acts of war, torture and rampant violations of civil rights. Way too many times have I been incensed when the Bush administration used Office of Legal Council (OLC) memoranda,...

How worried are Japanese about the rise of China? Hiroshi Kawamoto form Japan’s Isen Shimbun, after closely examining what he considers the calamitous decade of U.S. behavior since 9-11, warns that closer ties to America is the only strategy that has any hope of preserving Japanese prosperity. For Japan’s Isen Shimbun, Hiroshi Kawamoto writes in part: Trying to return to the United States of the...

I’ll be in Atlanta this afternoon on a panel after the screening of my video, For Such A Time As This, at the 24th annual Out on Film Festival. The documentary short tells the story of out proud lesbian Baptist preacher, Genie Hargrove, who was ordained the Southern Baptist minister of her rural Georgia church in 2004. My partner, Doug Keith, and I interviewed Genie for StoryCorps last February. That...

Is Washington’s Jewish lobby an impenetrable barrier to the realization of a Palestinian state? Columnist Moqif Mattar of Rumallah’s Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah writes that regardless of the potential benefits of better U.S. ties to Arabs, keeping Palestinian lands under Israeli control is just as much an article of faith for America as it is for Israel. For the Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, Moqif Mattar writes...

Some might remember in my book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, I wrote about the veiled Muslim women transgressing the stringent rules of their religious and political land that forbades women to drive cars… that when the war broke out and people were imperiled, they ran and started up the engines of the family automobiles and drove all over hill and dale to warn people and help people. The very same...

The very blunt comments of outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen that Pakistan intelligence has been actively assisting the Haqqani terrorist network has triggered another tremendous upwelling of anti-American sentiment in that nation. These three editorials from Pakistan’s The Nation and The Frontier Post well illustrate the skyrocketing passion and anger toward America now felt in that country. Just...

Did Arabs and more importantly, Palestinians, put too much faith in Barack Obama? According to columnist M. Saadoune of Algeria’s Le Quotidien d’Oran, anyone who thought President Obama would shake up the balance of power in the Middle East and make possible a Palestinian state was extremely naive, and now has learned the truth. For the Le Quotidien d’Oran, columnist M. Saadoune writes in...

Will the Arab street erupt in protest if the United States vetoes recognition of a Palestinian State in the U.N. Security Council, as President Obama has promised to do? According to columnist Osama al-Farra of Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah in the Palestinian Territories, unless Arabs rise up to defend Palestinians and their own dignity, there will be nothing left to do but await the next U.S. insult. For Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah...

A progressive Democrat and a conservative Republican were walking together one day on the sidewalk alongside a busy downtown street. They were arguing about various public policies, what to do about the growing number of unemployed Americans, and whether President Obama was partially or fully to blame for the current economy. Then they stopped and observed the following: An unemployed man was standing in the...

Eight years after the invasion of Iraq, which was prompted at least in part by Bush Administration claims that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks, how do Iraqis feel about al-Qaeda – and about America? For the Iraqi newspaper Sotal Iraq, columnist Rageb Al-Rakabi writes that Iraqis firmly reject the terror group and its plots to attack the United States. For Sotal Iraq,...

about whether Perry signed the writ to execute Cameron justly… even though it is thought now that Cameron may have been innocent. 234 people executed during Perry’s governorship. That’s equal to more than a third of the small town population where I grew up. I sit here imagining every third house in the northwoods having the hearse pull up. It seem odd that some politicos say they are pro...

After Michele Bachmann pounced on Rick Perry last night for his executive order mandating young girls to receive the HPV vaccine, former Alaska governor and now conservative darling-celebrity Sarah Palin has also piled on the Texas governor over the same issue, calling it a possible product of “crony capitalism.” Palin has used this term before. According to the New York Times, Palin used it before at...

Is it just a myth that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks badly damaged the American economy? According to columnist Thomas Fricke of the Financial Times Deutschland, the wars of vengeance launched by George W. Bush and the nearly catastrophic economic crash at the end of his term caused far more damage than Osama bin Laden ever dreamed of.` For the Financial Times Deutschland, Thomas Fricke writes in...

A quixotic and magnetic new film has been made by Dawn Gifford Engle in which Nobel peace Prize awardees such as Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchu Tum and other notables speak about the actual Mayan meaning of the end of the year 2012. There is a good long film clips here... A few years back, there arose a media-inflated rumor about 2012, rivaling, in my mind, a “barricade the...

The word eugenics was not used in Bachmann/ Perry argument. But, here is the definition. Does the matter they are discussing tilt into this: EUGENICS: the science of improving a human population… by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion...

What have we sacrificed in the process of pursuing the ‘War on Terror’? Continuing with our global coverage of the 9-11 anniversary, in this moving article from Sweden’s Sydsvenskan, columnist Heidi Avellan writes that no matter how hard it may be, hatred must be met with love, and our principles mustn’t be sacrificed in the pursuit of vengeance. For Sweden’s Sydsvenskan, Heidi...

Today we continue our coverage of the global outpouring in regard to the September 11 anniversary. This article is one of the dozens of stories posted on Worldmeets.US since yesterday. The funk the United States is currently in is of great concern to U.S. allies like Japan, who depend on American influence for their own security and prosperity. This editorial from Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun illustrates the...

At a time when America appears lost, and its leadership continues its reckless bid for global supremacy, it is interesting to recall the story of the only American who participated in India’s freedom struggle and was imprisoned by the British-Indian government. He gave up Western clothes and donned home-spun Khadi dress. A highly impressed Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his Young India: “No Indian is giving...

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the need for us, Americans, on this 10th anniversary of 9/11, to recommit ourselves to strengthening and bonding our nation from within… An Army chaplain, Major James Key, conducted his final funeral at Arlington National Cemetery a few weeks ago for an active duty soldier who died in combat while serving in Afghanistan. As his eyes “scanned the hallowed stones and...

ABC’s Good Morning America: U.S. authorities are scrambling to sort through information that the CIA developed in the past 24 hours indicating that at least three individuals entered the U.S. in August by air with the intent to launch a vehicle-borne attack against Washington, D.C. or New York around the anniversary of 9/11, according to intelligence officials. Officials say the alleged terror plot was...